South Korean soccer players take an oath to end match fixing and illegal betting last year.

A disgraced former professional football player has come back into the public eye.

South Korean police said Wednesday they arrested Kim Dong-hyun, a former Suwon Samsung Bluewings midfielder, on charges of armed robbery of a middle-aged woman in a posh neighborhood in southern Seoul on Saturday. Read More »

South Korea’s soccer match-fixing scandal shows no sign of abating, with a second suicide earlier this week by a former player and new accusations that players placed their own bets on thrown games keeping the story in the media spotlight.

The revelations have given domestic soccer an unusually high profile in news coverage. As in many countries in Asia, soccer is very popular in Korea but the domestic league is seen as a poor relation to games beamed in by satellite from Europe and South America. Attendances at K-League games were already modest and the scandal has seen crowd numbers dwindle further. Read More »

When the Asian Cup began, much of the focus on the South Korean squad was on how far those playing in the big European clubs like Park Ji-sung can carry the team. Instead, it’s been the young guns playing in the domestic K-League that have done much of the heavy lifting.

While scoring isn’t the only aspect of the game that deserves attention, numbers on the scoreboard are what counts at the end of a match. And of the eight goals scored so far by the Korean team in their march to the semifinals, all but one of them came from a K-Leaguer. Read More »

About Korea Real Time

Korea Real Time provides sharp analysis and insight into what’s making news on the Korean peninsula. We chronicle the growing pains of South Korea — a country that has skyrocketed into the club of the world’s richest nations but now faces significant headwinds, and shine a spotlight on one of the world’s biggest geopolitical flashpoints: North Korea. Drawing on the expertise of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, we’ll tell the stories behind the headlines in business, economics, politics, culture and lifestyle. You can contact the editors at korearealtime@wsj.com